Thoughts about politics, economics, societal trends in our lives and anything else that tickles my fancy. In the Spring and Summer the Sacramento Rivercats become part of this rant.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Who was the worst pundit and the best for 2006?

This is a pretty exceptional group but for my money one might look to Bob Novak. On the Sunday before the election he released a list of four graphics purporting to be the lowdown on what would happen on Tuesday. The house predictions were laughable. He included a lot of house seats which I did not find others thought were in contention. But his senate projections thought the GOP would hold Missouri (a lot of other people did too), Tennessee (he even got that right), and Virginia and Maryland. Thus, he was 0-4 for those key races. Of course he picked Santorum and DeWine and the Minnesota seat, Nebraska, Vermont and Washington and he even picked West Virginia correctly.

A second choice might be Liddy Dole, who ran the GOP campaign committee in the Senate. She simply was not up to competing against Chuck Shumer.

A third choice might be Daily Kos - from his idiotic support for Lamont to all of the other things he did in this election - he thought this was a chance to have a democrat wave. If the numbers hold up, this is not a rout but a bit below what happened to war time presidents since the Civil War.

But there were also some new sites which were quite interesting and added to the discussion. For example one site already began to think about 2008 and the fundamental fights that will develop for that election. The suggestion was that of the 29 seats lost by the GOP yesterday - only ten of them are likely to turn in the next election. In this case the site election projection was actually pretty good. On Election Projection they looked at a similar issue arises for the Senate - where there are a raft of GOP senators who are likely to retire.

Perhaps the most reliable site during this season was the same as the last election Real Clear Politics did some honest review of all of the possible methods of analyzing the election. Two or three times he posted an analysis of what we should know about how to think about trends. Each of these were thoughtful efforts to begin to build a theory of politics.

In the next couple of days, there will be a lot of discussion about what happens next. Unfortunately, there is no consumer's guide to pundits. But as you read them they will begin to sort themselves out.